Like the painted vases of Classical Greece, Moche ceramics have conventionally been studied as “visual texts” – an approach that Casper Mayer describes as “a conceptual vacuum that excludes bodies” from the study of sex (2018).  A more materialist approach allows us to consider the pots as ceramic bodies, engaged in bodily acts with other kinds of bodies: playing jokes, making babies, and drinking with the dead. Seen in this way, the pots show us a way of inhabiting our own bodies, not as isolated individuals, but as beings sustained by relational interactions within a lively social field that encompasses persons human and nonhuman, animal and geophysical.  

Mary Weismantel is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She has published on “slow seeing” at Chavín de Huantar, on sexual themes in Moche ceramics, as on the site of Çatalhoyük.  Additionally, she is the author of numerous articles and two books on her ethnographic research: Food Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (1989), and the award-winning Cholas and Pishtacos: Tales of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001).